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DESIGN NOTEBOOK; 'Virtual Officing' Comes In From the Cold

THE advertising agency that urges Apple Computer buyers to ''Think different'' is once again on the cusp of an evolution in workplace design.

Four years ago, Chiat/Day led the charge into the brave new world of ''virtual officing'' when its headquarters in Venice, Calif., proved too small for a fast-expanding staff.

Jay Chiat, one of the company's founders, equipped everyone with a mobile phone, a laptop and a personal locker, and turned a problem into a much vaunted workplace experiment. Now, just shy of the third millennium, TBWA/Chiat/Day, as the agency is now known, has traded virtual communication for the real thing, to combat employees' overwhelmingly negative response. It has just moved into a space in the Playa del Rey section of Los Angeles, where everyone has his own desk and human interaction is key, in a plan that draws from a model as ancient as telecommuting is new: the city.

The offices, in a vast warehouse designed for 500 employees by Clive Wilkinson Architects, are a microcosmic ''Chiat town'' of private and group work spaces and public ''streets'' and meeting places that provide for every kind of company activity. Staff members enjoy kaffeeklatsches in a ''Central Park,'' mingle on a ''main street'' and have a work space they can call home in surrounding ''neighborhoods.''

This turnabout by the progressive agency reflects a ''phenomenal shift in people's thinking'' about the state of the art of the workplace, said Despina Katsikakis, director of DEGW, a London-based international consultancy on workplace design. While virtual officing is by no means dead -- TBWA/ Chiat/Day staff members still carry mobile phones and beepers, and connect by computer -- the latest experiment in breaking free from designs based on the old hierarchical pecking order is what Ms. Katsikakis called ''community-based planning.'' It locates staff members in teams (rather than on status-implied floors), offers private spaces and includes clubby meeting areas.

This approach is now being tried at corporations like Andersen Consulting, in its offices around the world, and at Sun Microsystems in Palo Alto, albeit in a more conservative style than at TBWA/Chiat/Day.

The agency has always experimented with architecture and the workplace, starting with its move, in 1979, to the venerable Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. (''Jay didn't want the firm to lose touch with the consumer,'' said Laurie Coots, the chief marketing officer for the company.) That was followed, in the mid-80's, by a move to the bohemian Venice, first to a temporary warehouse space and then to its own building, both landmark designs by Frank O. Gehry.

Mr. Chiat also had two of Mr. Gehry's fellow superstar architects, Rem Koolhaas and Gaetano Pesce, create, respectively, London and New York offices. In each space, the aim of the architecture was to keep people stimulated and feeling part of a family, albeit one with a steely drive and a yen for knowing self-promotion. In 1976, the company ran an advertisement in Adweek declaring its pain at losing a Honda account. Now, it is cheerfully revising its thinking about what makes a workplace work.

The virtual office ''sounded good in theory, but ultimately violated human tenets,'' said Lee Clow, the company's chairman. He added, ''People need a sense of place and belonging.'' The idea behind the virtual office was that telecommuting would allow people to work anywhere, anytime, and that they would use the outgrown building only for teamwork. As it turned out, most staff members needed or wanted to work under the same roof.

Current and former employees paint a picture of harried workers fighting over too-few desks, defiantly displaying family photos and trying to stake out personal space in a place planned like a club. ''People felt like they were working in a cocktail party,'' Ms. Coots said. The new place blends what the company sees as the best of the previous environments. Yes, TBWA/Chiat/Day staff members still share the airwaves. But now, Ms. Coots said, ''we share the same air.''

From a vivid yellow exterior gatehouse, visitors enter a large busy industrial-style space -- a playful version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Youthful employees buzz about: up and down the mesh stairs and balconies; along the wide ''main street'' of stacked ''cliff dwellings,'' Hollywood Squares-style, that are home to pairs of art directors and copywriters who work as creative teams; in Central Park, a ficus-lined internal plaza, and on the hallowed basketball court, a symbol of the zest and competitiveness of the firm.

Scattered around this town center are neighborhoods of project dens: groups of desks enclosed by diaphanous spandex tent structures for privacy and open-plan work areas with freestanding aluminum work stations called Nests (for New Environment for Strategic Tasking), one-legged desks with screens for acoustic and visual privacy. (They are now manufactured by the agency in a co-production with the office furniture giant Steelcase.) The cute name refers to the very nesting instincts that virtual officing had rejected and that are now being increasingly factored into office planning nationwide.

TBWA/Chiat/Day has rebounded from a bumpy patch in the mid-90's, during which it was sold to a holding company, the Omnicom Group, was merged with TBWA and saw the departure of Jay Chiat, whose demanding, inventive spirit, company members say, lives on in the space and in the work.

It was unanimously picked as agency of the year for 1997 by the advertising trade magazines, and this year, it scored an Emmy for its Apple Computer campaign, which features arresting images of great achievers, stamped with the slogan ''Think different.''

But how innovative is the new office? The design merges the high-tech style popular in Europe, typified by Richard Rodgers's and Renzo Piano's Pompidou Center, with the robust warehouse office projects of Mr. Gehry and the late Frank Israel.

While it may be striking and lively, with its jazzy cliff dwellings, billowing tent structures, flying balconies, exposed plywood partitions and touches of whimsy (like a bar made of surfboards), it doesn't quite break the old pecking order. In following the principles of good town planning, the company has, in fact, introduced hierarchy, albeit of a more accessible kind than the mahogany-paneled corner office of traditional corporate America. Two company principals who once had spaces equal to everyone else's now each have impressive suites overlooking Central Park, and while creative pairs get prominent, private ''cliff dwellings,'' most of the rest nest in the open-plan areas.

And as for staying in touch with the consumer, the new TBWA/Chiat/ Day is an interior world. Viewless, located at the end of a road of industrial buildings and bungalows (near where Dreamworks is due to start construction), the office is currently nowhere near cafes, shoe repairs, stores or pedestrians -- namely, the stuff and stimuli of daily life.

A former staff member, Rebecca Epstein, now a doctoral student at the school of film and television at the University of California at Los Angeles, said that she found it a somewhat isolating experience. ''Because the light is the same all day long, and you have no sense of time,'' she said, ''it's a little like a casino.''

Even the new artwork is self-reflective: a fish tank from TBWA/ Chiat/Day's Energizer bunny campaign, agency commercials broadcast nonstop on a large screen over the basketball court, sofas upholstered in Levi denim (Levi's jeans is a new client), and a billboard featuring Picasso, one of the Apple ''Think different'' personalities.

The all-seeing, all-knowing nature of the space, with its mezzanines, walkways and glass-fronted cubicles, reminded one visitor of the slightly totalitarian feel of a penitentiary. But an employee who refused to be identified said the new offices are ''like a big playground.'' And she likes the fact that they are all on one floor, which, she said, ''invites more interaction.''

Ironically, Bob Kuperman, the company's president, said that some of the agency's best work was produced in its last space -- cocktail party or not. He cited the ''Think different'' campaign, a provocative series of ads extolling television for ABC and the Taco Bell talking chihuahua. ''There's something to be said for the fact that the overcrowding did cause a high level of energy and creative output,'' he said. A self-declared advocate of ''friction and upset,'' Mr. Kuperman added that ''the company is right on the edge'' with its new quarters.

Meanwhile in New York, the virtual office designed by Gaetano Pesce, however gorgeous, sent some staff members over the edge. Mr. Wilkinson says the agency has moved out of its overcrowded and confusing space into new offices that he is designing. And where is that new workplace? In the former bastion of the advertising elite, the epitome of everything the old Chiat/Day repudiated: Madison Avenue. Think different indeed.

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A version of this article appears in print on December 17, 1998, on Page F00001 of the National edition with the headline: DESIGN NOTEBOOK; 'Virtual Officing' Comes In From the Cold. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe